East Timor

This week on The ABR Podcast we reflect on the occupation and liberation of East Timor twenty-five years on from that extraordinary rupture. Clinton Fernandes draws on secret records released last month showing attempts by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) to change the Australian War Memorial’s history of East Timor. Clinton Fernandes is Professor of International and Political Studies at the University of New South Wales. Listen to Clinton Fernandes’s ‘History without vexed issues: Liquidating our memories of East Timor’, published in the October issue of ABR.

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Twenty-five years ago, an international peacekeeping force entered East Timor, delivered it from Indonesian occupation, and placed it under United Nations administration. Known as the International Force East Timor (InterFET), it had 11,000 troops from twenty-three countries and was commanded by an Australian major general. Everything about these events seemed miraculous. East Timor’s independence had long been regarded as impossible; a top adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt observed during World War II that it might eventually achieve self-government, but ‘it would certainly take a thousand years’. Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975 while the latter was in the process of decolonising from Portugal, annexed it the following year, and declared its rule ‘irreversible’.

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In an age of disinformation, whistleblowers such as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden have been accorded the status of folk heroes. And yet, as their respective cases show, no other act of public service is harried as ruthlessly and vindictively by governments whose secrets have been aired. In this episode of The ABR Podcast, listen to Kieran Pender read his cover feature for the April issue, in which he argues for stronger whistleblower protections by examining the case of Bernard Collaery.

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Peter Job, a former East Timor activist, has written a careful, dispassionate account of the stance of Gough Whitlam’s and Malcolm Fraser’s successive governments in relation to Portuguese East Timor. He has consulted a commendably wide range of oral and written sources, interviewing, for example, several retired senior Australian officials formerly engaged in the design and implementation of Timor policy. His story ends in 1983, with Bob Hawke’s election to office. Job should be encouraged to complete his account in the future to acquaint readers with developments up to at least the UN intervention in 1999 that gave Australian diplomacy a new role.

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Think of Syria today and you have East Timor in 1975–78, the main difference being that the story of Indonesia’s brutal invasion was totally hidden from the world. It was in this framework of pain, trauma, and confusion that an estimated three to four thousand Timorese children were carried off to Indonesia without informed parental consent.

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Shirley Shackleton is well known to those acquainted with the story of the fight for justice by the families of the Balibo Five, the five reporters who were slaughtered in 1975 in a border town of what was then Portuguese Timor. Her husband, Greg Shackleton, and his colleagues, Gary Cunningham, Tony Stewart, Brian Peters and Malcolm Rennie – all in their twenties – were killed by Indonesian soldiers at dawn on 16 October, shortly after filming a major infantry, naval and air attack on the town of Balibo.

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Thirty-four years after the former colony of Portuguese Timor experienced the horrors of invasion by the Indonesian army, the story of the killing of the five television journalists known as the Balibo Five – a persistent subtext of that history – has found new life in the forthcoming feature film Balibo, directed by Arenafilm’s Robert Connolly. In reviewing Tony Maniaty’s related book, I must declare a vested interest: his book Shooting Balibo: Blood and Memory in East Timor has appeared on bookshelves two months earlier than a book of my own, on which that film is based.

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The publisher’s blurb that accompanied my review copy of Joseph Nevins’s book makes two prominent assertions. One is that the United Nations has given Indonesia a six-month deadline to prosecute war crimes committed in East Timor in 1999. The other is that Paul Wolfowitz, a former US ambassador to Indonesia and an architect of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, was complicit in East Timor atrocities. I suppose such attention-grabbers are needed to sell books in today’s over-saturated literary markets, but these two do little justice to the broad sweep and value of Nevins’s latest work. (Under the pen name Matthew Jardine, he has written two others on East Timor, and is something of an activist on the subject.)

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The careful media management accompanying the Australian National Archive’s release in January 2004 of cabinet papers covering the first year in office of the Whitlam government underlined the interest of the ageing ex-prime minister and his supporters in safeguarding his status as an Australian icon. It was a success: most analysts agreed that the papers showed that in 1973 the newly elected Labor government performed with exceptional dynamism and transparency.

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Jill Jolliffe was one of only two reporters in Dili on 16 October 1975, the day the Australian-based newsmen, soon to be known as the Balibo Five, went missing after an Indonesian attack on the small East Timorese border town of Balibo. Jolliffe filed for AAP Reuters the first reports of the attack that killed them, and monitored the ominous broadcasts from Indonesian-controlled West Timor that referred to the missing newsmen as Australian communists who were supporting Fretilin forces. Jolliffe interviewed the Portuguese journalists who had left Balibo the day before the attack and the Fretilin troops themselves who defended the town. Finally, eleven days after the attack on Balibo, she spoke to an eyewitness, a stretcher-bearer from the Fretilin side, who confirmed that the journalists had been killed in the attack. ... (read more)